Wednesday 22 November 2006

Dev for localization and International projects

Just to conlude as I have been guilty of not being completely clear about what the rules were that we worked out with the clients in question.

They are as follows, all localisation as well as any additional functionality added for one or more countries have to adhere to them in the customer implementation.

1. All code added to be rendered contralable through added parameters in the corresponding parameter table to the module concerned.

2. All parameters that are added have to be associated with either a security key or a feature key. Typically localisation parameters are on a feature key and others on a security key.

This is used to group functionality in logical parts especially where functionality covers several modules in the system, and also of course to partition country functionality.

3. All parameters are always simple yes / no enums or booleans where the value 0 or no is always the equivalent of switching off the functionality.

This ensures that if a country has no need for a particular module and switches off in the security / rights module the access to changing the parameters, they are always default off.


In a multi country scenario given the above we can do as follows :

Switch on all the countries involved in our implementation, and for each domain (company) switch off through security setup the access to any countries localisation thus switching the code associated off.

Of course strictly speaking the customer I spoke off does not need to do the work quite so stringently as they only have one database and they control what bits of localisation are implemented in their code. But just in case they ever decide f'ex to create a company in south east asia, in order to remain on the same code base they preferred to go through the process completely and follow the rules as laid out throughout.

So hopefully Microsoft will implement similar rules in their localisation work in order that the quality of the product we get out to work with is ameliorated.

/Sven

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